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Blue Button Mash-Up & EHR Accessibility Module Challenge Winners

HHS held an Innovation Challenge and patients were the winners! Winners for the Blue Button Mash-Up Challenge and the EHR Accessibility Module Challenge were announced during the Health 2.0 Sixth Annual Fall Conference in San Francisco.

The first Challenge required applicants to ‘mash up’ Blue Button data with other open health data and information. “Blue Button” data is personal health information a patient can download through their health plan, doctor, or hospital.

The second Challenge asked solvers to create and test a tool that makes it easy for people with disabilities to access and interact with the health data stored in their electronic health records (EHR).

The Blue Button winner, iBlueButton, submitted by Humetrix of San Diego, is a dual-app system. The Patient version provides an intuitive, secure solution consumers can use to connect to their Blue Button and other health records. The Physician version transmits in-app generated Visit Summaries or Patient Records using Push technology to the patient. iBlueButton includes features such as patient-optimized and physician-optimized displays and dashboards, medication look-up, and new tools to download or print health information.

The EHR Accessibility winner, Pinaxis, created Apollo, is a fully accessible Internet portal that will allow patients to interact with any provider’s existing EHR system over the Web. Apollo’s patient portal is designed to enhance the user experience for patients, which is currently plagued by serious accessibility concern hindering use by people of diverse disabilities, including those who have vision, hearing, intellectual, manual dexterity, mental health, developmental and other types of disabilities. This tool is currently being tested as a prototype; more information can be found with the Pinaxis Medical Group.

The challenges are part of ONC’s Investing in Innovation program which utilizes prizes and challenges to encourage innovation. The goal of these challenges is to obtain solutions to intractable health IT problems. A list of past winners of ONC challenges can be found here. Aligned with the administration’s innovation agenda, i2 is the first federal program to operate under the authority of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama on Jan. 4, 2011. For details, see http://www.health2challenge.org/category/onc/.

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